The River House (21 page)

He leans toward me. His expression is unreadable because of the sunglasses.

“Ginnie. I was at home when you rang. You mustn’t do that. You mustn’t ever ring in the evening, when I could be at home.”

“I won’t do it again,” I say. “I know it’s difficult for you. But I was just so worried. About that man I saw. That he was
something to do with—you know, what’s happened.”

“For God’s sake, Ginnie.”

“I mean—what shall we do?”

“What shall
we
do? It’s not
us
, Ginnie, it’s
you
. I didn’t see anything.”

I’m studying his face. But all I can see in his lenses is my own reflection—distorted, like the face of the moon in a children’s
nursery rhyme.

“But—d’you think I should tell someone?” I say.

“Look,” he says. He’s trying to be reasonable, but I can hear the edge of exasperation in his voice. “Tell me again what you
think you saw.”

“It was a man running.”

“So?”

“It was something about him—I don’t know, he made me feel afraid. … I had this mad idea that he was looking for us. But maybe
it wasn’t that. Maybe that wasn’t what he was looking for.”

“Ginnie, you saw whatever you saw. But I just don’t get why you think this was so significant.”

“It was just a feeling …” My voice trails off; it seems so flimsy and insubstantial, what I was going to say. I take a slow
breath. “But I’ve learned to trust my feelings, in the kind of work I do. Clem and I, we quote this at one another—how someone
makes you feel is information. …”

He makes a rapid gesture, as if he’s flicking something away.

“Listen,” he says. “She can’t have been killed on the river path in broad daylight. Or dumped there, come to that. No one—however
deranged—would do that. Not in such an exposed place with all the traffic on the river. It can’t have been the man you saw.”

This soothes me; it sounds so reasonable. It’s what I want—for him to reassure me—so I can close this door in my head and
never open it again. But I have to pursue it a little further, to be completely sure.

“But—mightn’t he have gone back to the place where he left her? Perhaps to check her body hadn’t come to the surface?”

He shrugs. “Unlikely,” he says.

“I just want to be certain. To know I’ve done the right thing.”

“Yeah, well.” He twists his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste. “It isn’t always exactly obvious just what the right thing
is.”

If only I hadn’t had my eyes open: if only I hadn’t seen. But I did see. What you see can hurt you.

We sip our drinks. In the thin, clear light, the shadows of our hands on the table are sharp, as though cut with a blade.
I’m very alert, sensing the anger that’s hidden under his words, watching for clues to his mood: as a wife might watch her
husband, as my mother used to watch my father, always vigilant. How did this happen? I push the thought away.

There’s a scrap of music as someone goes into the bar—a saxophone, indolent, caressing, singing out for a moment, then abruptly
silenced with the closing of the door.

“Who was she?” I say. “The woman who was killed?”

“They don’t know yet. You’ll see it in the paper, once she’s been identified.” He sips his Coke. “Roger’s in charge of the
investigation.”

“Roger?” This gives me a cold feeling. “That’s a weird coincidence, isn’t it?”

He shrugs.

“Why? It’s his kind of case.”

He finishes his Coke and pushes the glass away. When he frowns there are hard lines etched around his mouth and his eyes.

“You need to think about what we’ve got to lose,” he says. “I mean, it would be a total fucking disaster if this got out.”

“Yes, of course. For me too.”

I know this: I think it often; we have talked about it, promised each other. That what we will seek to do above all is to
keep our love affair absolutely secret. But when he says this, my eyes fill up with tears.

Maybe he feels he’s been too abrupt.

“Look, you know I love you,” he says.

“I love you too,” I tell him.

He puts his hand on mine.

“You’ll just forget all about this?”

I nod.

I think for a moment—what happens to people like us, to secret lovers, at the end of the affair? How do you keep going? You’d
be plunged into all that grief, and you’d never be able to show it, ever, ever. What happens then?

“I’d better go. I’m getting late,” he says.

“I could drop you off somewhere.”

“But you haven’t finished your drink.”

He gets up, reaches across to kiss me lightly on the lips.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says.

I feel a thread of sadness that makes me want to cling. And I wonder if I’ve been kidding myself, pretending it’s all so easy:
that I’m so strong and independent, that I can let him go. Have I been lying to myself about this all along?

“Next week?” he says.

“Yes, please …”

He smiles at the
please
.

I watch him go. The melted frost on the grass has a cold glitter. I watch his grace as he walks down the path and out of the
winter garden and away from me.

O
N
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
, Greg is working in the university library, and Amber is going shopping with Jamila—there are sequined ballerina shoes Jamila
really
needs
.

“Amber, I could be out later,” I tell her. “D’you have your keys and your phone?”

“Mum, you ought to know by now,” says Amber, rather wearily. “I never go anywhere without my phone.”

When she’s gone, I call Max and invite myself over.

It’s a half-hour drive to Max’s house. I pass the high, mossy wall that goes around the convent garden, and the Victorian
waterworks, where seagulls bob on the reservoir like scraps of discarded paper. There’s a fair at Hampton Court. For much
of the way the road goes close to the river. It must have been very pleasant here before London encroached and heavy traffic
started coming through. There are old timbered houses, a Norman church, and an antiquarian bookshop where, years ago, the
girls and I spent a leisurely afternoon. It was crammed and disorderly, books overflowing the shelves and heaped on the floor
in piles as tall as a child. Baroque motets were playing, and there were tatty sofas covered in rose-red velvet, and everything
had its soft gray bloom of dust. The spines of the books cracked when you opened them, a small, sharp sound like the breaking
of tiny bones. The proprietor had an ancient greatcoat and the voice of an Oxford don and a week’s worth of stubble; he sat
and read in the back room. Through the window behind him you could see a tiny courtyard, enclosed and enchanted, with statuary
and vines, the ground gray with the leaves of many autumns, and on a wrought-iron table a candelabra with burned-down stubs
of candle: You could picture him drinking there on summer evenings. We found many treasures—a
Gulliver’s Travels
illustrated by Rackham that I bought for Ursula; an edition of Dante’s
Inferno
. I read the first stanza of the Dante to the girls, the lines about finding yourself in a dark wood where the right way was
lost, speaking in a hushed voice. The pages were roughly cut but thick and edged with gold.

From outside, Max’s house looks like an ordinary semi, but it’s been expensively gutted and modernized. His silver soft-top
Mercedes is parked in the street. I ring his bell and wait on his doorstep, between two trim conifers in metal buckets. I
can hear the Saturday sounds—children playing in a garden, the lazy afternoon rhythms of surburban trains.

“Ginnie. How lovely.”

There’s a tiny hesitation before he kisses my cheek. But maybe I’m imagining it. He has a rich male smell, of sandalwood and
leather.

“There’s something I need to talk about.”

“Ginnie, you said. Come through.”

His kitchen is gleaming and glamorous, all stainless steel and spotlights and complicated controls. He uses it for fixing
drinks and cooking an occasional Marks & Spencer ready-meal.

I watch as he pours our whiskey. In the unrelenting afternoon light that comes through his wide windows, you can see that
his hair is flecked with gray, that his body is getting more solid, gravity pulling hard on him, his Guernsey sweater just
a bit too tight. Still good-looking though, with elegant hands. I’m sure men don’t have the faintest notion how avidly we
watch their hands—the way they pour a drink or take out their cuff links and push up the sleeves of their shirts—always secretly
alert for a grace that might give us pleasure. And you can guess from his hands that Max would be a skillful lover.

It could have happened, perhaps, if I had let it. There was always something between us—a flicker of sex—though compromised
by the fact that I’m an inch or two taller than him. I remember a moment in the early days of our friendship, when we were
still students. We were drinking after a concert; all the others had gone—even Dylan, who always drinks with great commitment—and
Max held my eyes a little too long, and remarked that I seemed so uptight, that I really ought to let go. That moment when
everything can change, the man moving in closer, speaking obliquely or in metaphors, casually bringing sex into the conversation
or saying he’d really have liked to give you a lift. … I’ve always found that how you respond in that moment is utterly beyond
your conscious control; yet a laugh or a slight turning away will close the door forever. And in my head I was open to a relationship
with Max—but I think I laughed a little and shrugged and looked away. All for the best, probably; it could have been a disaster.
Max can be pretty heartless. I once spent an intense evening sharing a bottle of Beaujolais with one of his many discarded
lovers: He’d dumped her by e-mail, and she’d been devastated by the casual way he’d ended what for her had been the real thing.
Not that he doesn’t take his love affairs seriously. He views them with a cool detachment, as a practical project worthy of
proper study, like choosing and maintaining a stereo system.

Max opens his fridge to get to the icebox. The fridge is empty except for a bottle of sparkling mineral water. He breaks ice
into our glasses.

“Are you OK?” he says, turning back to me. “You look a bit shaky, Ginnie.”

I tell him about my mother.

Max sympathizes. He knows about sick parents—his own mother has osteoporosis. Max often stays the weekend with her. I’ve met
her: She’s stiff and twisted as a thorn tree, but sometimes I feel that this worn, fragile woman is still his safety, his
center—that he’ll commit to a lover only when she’s gone.

“But that isn’t what I came to talk about,” I say.

“No. I gathered that.”

He gives me my drink, and we go through to his living room, which has leather sofas and CDs alphabetically arranged. Wide
windows open onto the garden, which is mostly expensively landscaped pebbles. There are orange tulips in pots. The flowers
are sprawling open; you can see the blue stain at their throats.

I’ve chosen Max to confide in because I know he will be secret. He won’t condemn me, and I’m sure he’d never tell. Not out
of some moral compunction, not because he’d think it essentially wrong to break a confidence, just because it would never
occur to him to do so. But now that I’m here it’s difficult, more difficult than I thought. My mouth is like blotting paper.

“Max, I’d just like to get your view on something.”

“Yes. You said.”

He has a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“You don’t mind?” I ask him.

He makes a quick, vague gesture with the hand that holds the drink. The ice rattles.

“I don’t know what it is,” he says.

He glances across at me. He’s sipping his whiskey too rapidly, as if he’s anxious at being confided in: though maybe I’m imagining
this, projecting my own anxiety onto him.

I clear my throat.

“There’s a woman I know,” I tell him.

A slight smile. “OK.”

“She has a relationship that’s very secret.”

He nods. “It happens,” he says. He’s peering into his whiskey.

I’d thought he’d be more intrigued—that he’d tease or cajole me, trying to find out more. But he just waits quietly for me
to carry on.

“She’s with her friend in a secret place, and nobody knows they’re there. And she sees something that perhaps should be reported.”

He’s alert now, looking at me: but also in some way more relaxed, as though some tension has fallen from him.

“To the police, you mean?” he says. “This thing she sees—it’s something criminal?”

“Maybe. She doesn’t know that. She just thinks it could be. But she’d certainly report it if she hadn’t been with this person.”

He nods. There’s a glint in his eye—he’s enjoying this game we’re playing.

“But if she tells, and it all comes out—people might be hurt?” he says.

I nod. We sit in silence for a moment.

“I wanted to know what might happen if she rang the police. I mean—she could do that anonymously, couldn’t she?”

“Yes. Of course. Lots of people do.” He takes a pensive sip of whiskey. “But you’d have to think—your friend would have to
think—would she be happy to do that and leave it there, if she really had some information that might affect a criminal prosecution?
And presumably that’s what she thinks or she wouldn’t be so concerned.”

“Yes. She thinks that.”

“She has to ask herself—what will she do if the case goes to court, and they want her to give evidence?”

“They could make her?” I say.

“That depends. The judge could subpoena her. But that’s a last resort, of course. The police would try to persuade her, they’d
rather she did it voluntarily. Assuming her evidence is crucial to the prosecution’s case, and she can’t know that yet. How
I see it, Ginnie—it would be hard to take just one step along that path and leave it there.”

For a moment I don’t say anything. I think of the face that haunts me—her glazed eyes, her swollen pallor—the woman pulled
from the water. Of the flowers on the riverbank.